Manhunt Inc.: Firm 'Tags' Terrorists for Special Ops

Share

Manhunt Inc.: Firm 'Tags' Terrorists for Special Ops

When trading ended Tuesday night at the New York Stock Exchange, the closing bell wasn't rung by a titan of finance or an imported celebrity. It was sounded by the CEO of an obscure defense firm with deep ties to the U.S. intelligence and special operations communities. The traders on the floor may not have recognized Mary Margaret "Peggy" Styer. But her company's products are well known by the small group of commandos and spies who hunt down top terrorists.

See also: Photo GalleryCrazy Military Tracking: Super Scents to Quantum DotsOver the last decade Styer's company, the Virginia-based Blackbird Technologies, has become a leading supplier of equipment for the covert "tagging, tracking and locating" of suspected enemies. Every month, U.S. Special Operations Command spends millions of dollars on Blackbird gear. The U.S. Navy has a contract with Blackbird for $450 million worth of these so-called "TTL" devices. "Tens of thousands" of Blackbird's devices have been sent to the field, according to a former employee. And TTL is just one part of the Herndon, Virginia firm's multifaceted relationship with the special operations, intelligence and traditional military services.

"Blackbird has hit the trifecta: They've got people to sell, people to perform the job, and people to keep it all secret," says one well-placed Defense Department contractor. "Everybody keeps their distance."

Blackbird helps hunt for missing troops, and pries information off the hard drives captured in military raids. The firm counts one of the CIA's most famous former operatives among its 250 or so employees. Its staff hackers specialize in infiltrating hostile networks without leaving a trace. Interest in the methods commandos and intelligence operatives use to track down leading targets may have spiked since the killing of Osama bin Laden; for Blackbird, it's old news. The company has spent years at the center of this secretive field.

"Several of my former colleagues were and still are Blackbird employees. They do a lot of recruiting in FBNC," says a retired special operator, using the acronym for U.S. Army Special Operations Command's home base of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. "Their business is heavily weighted towards the dark side."

It'd be an extraordinary role for any midsized company to play in America's national security apparatus, even in an era of private corporations taking on tasks once reserved for government employees. But what's particularly remarkable is that, 10 years ago, Blackbird was just another small network-security shop.

Crude tracking devices are widely used by law enforcement agencies to surveil suspects. But Blackbird's locators aren't like the retro-gadgets the FBI sticks on kids' cars. The beacons can hop between cellular, satellite or radio frequencies to report their locations.

"Whatever's available. If there's a GSM tower nearby, it can use that. Or it can switch to something else, if it's closer," a former employee says. The encrypted signals are cross-checked with GPS position data, to create maps of where a particular target is currently, and has traveled in the past.

The idea is to give U.S. commanders the ability to "identify high-value targets in his sector," Blackbird vice president and retired Lt. Col. Timur Eads told Danger Room in an interview last year. That commander can also use the tags to trace the routes and attack points used by insurgent bombing networks.

>'It's not exactly a benevolent type of business,' says an ex-employee.

Or, the officer can give the devices to his own troops, keeping track of their whereabouts on a handheld device. The gadgets can also pass encrypted text messages to one another, giving the troops way to communicate silently and over long distances. Today, if the average infantryman wants a capability even remotely similar, he has to be in his vehicle or wearing several pounds of specialized gear.

One U.S. Special Operations Command shopping list for Blackbird's "close access persistent surveillance equipment," issued on Sept. 15, 2009, gives a sense of how widespread the company's gear was used. The list included 363 iBat, iFox and Outlaw tracking devices; 1,355,000 "beacons" from those devices; 110,000 "shots" to the Globalstar communications satellite; 393,000 SMS messages (including 135,000 on Blackbird's "secure TTL server"); radio frequency transmitters, terminals for the CDMA and GSM 3G cellular networks; and 135 HTC smartphones. Fifteen days later, the Command announced it would spend $3.6 million on the equipment.

Blackbird doesn't just track targets. Once that person is located, Blackbird specialists also work to unlock the data from his or her computers, discs and drives. "Like, if you found Osama's laptop," a former employee says. (The interview was conducted before the raid on bin Laden's compound. Since then, Blackbird hasn't responded to multiple requests to comment for this story.)

According to the Washington Post, Blackbird developed "a compact, rugged, powerful, all-in-one kit" to pull out this information. "Its capabilities include detection of chemical and biological agents, extraction from cellphones and PDAs, scanning and translation of documents, computer forensics, collection and transmission of biometric data, and digital photography."

The company also works to extract information from machines far away, through "network exploitation" and "computer infiltration," the ex-employee says. "Black-hat-type stuff. Not exactly a benevolent type of business."

In its early years, Blackbird was a very different kind of company. The firm billed itself as a consulting firm helping organizations "identify and protect against potential sources of hacking, industrial espionage, information theft or sabotage."

By 2006, however, the firm's focus had begun to shift. On its website, there were seemingly-benign questions for potential clients about "how will new wireless technologies such as 3G wireless and Bluetooth change the opportunities and risks associated with my firm’s IT infrastructure?" But Blackbird also talked up its "tracking and locating expertise, including experience with technical systems that provide a clear picture of operational assets and targets."

>Blackbird's main purpose may be to make things disappear.

Blackbird's sister company, the cybersecurity firm RavenWing, was sold off to Boeing in 2008. Around the same time, Blackbird was temporarily thrust into the spotlight, when Eads was involved in the "Pentagon Pundits" imbroglio — retired military officers who were hired as news analysts for their Pentagon access. Eads opined on military matters for Fox News.

Last month, U.S. officials quietly approved a Blackbird patent for tracking devices, 2 inches wide and a half-inch thick, that could be stuck on a person or vehicle. Sketched out with clip art and crude line drawings, the patent seems to cover a dumbed-down version of the company's existing gear. Blackbird claims there could be all sorts of uses for the device: "child safety," for example, or "remote outdoor activities such as hiking and climbing."

Meanwhile, Blackbird has continued its involvement in one of the armed forces' most sensitive missions: recovering people who went missing on the battlefield. That's a job once reserved for elite military units. To outsource even a small part of it is extraordinary, even in this age of privatized security.

"We’re not the guys that go out and kick down doors and bring out the Jessica Lynches of the world," Eads said. "We're the guys in the background, assembling the forensic information, bringing all the threads together."

A second former Blackbird employee, however, tells Danger Room that he repeatedly went "outside the wire" in Iraq to search for the missing. This ex-employee not only claims that he was in on the manhunt for Issa Salome, the Iraq-American contractor kidnapped in January 2010, he also says he was part of the team that eventually recovered the remains of Capt. Scott Speicher, the U.S. Navy pilot shot down in Iraq during the Gulf War. These assertions could not be independently verified.

And that's the point, a Defense Department contractor says. Companies like Blackbird "aren't subject to the controls and regulations the government or even quasi-governmental organizations get."

Getting a clear view of the clandestine worlds of intelligence agencies and special operations has never been easy. Adding a contractor to the mix only obfuscates things further, even when that contractor has an ample online trail, like Blackbird's. The company may be selling tools for tracking and locating people. But Blackbird's main purpose may be to make things disappear.